When they asked Lucy’s father what word he would use to describe Lucy, he said “phantasmagorical.” He had trouble pronouncing the word, so it came out jumbled, messy, and illiterate, which ironically perfectly suited his thoughts on Lucy. He loved her, yes; he’d seen galaxies when he’d held her for the first time in that pale, un-galaxy-like hospital room. But the years unraveled, the string came loose, and now when he thought of her, love was pretty much all he could think about.
This was how he saw the world; black black black black. The best things in the world can’t possibly be seen, he had told her, they can be felt. He claimed that he sometimes could feel music even when the stereo was off, could imagine Bowie’s words floating in the air, bouncing on the furniture: the velvet armchair, the whitewashed table (or was it black?), the stack of unread books, twisting their way into his mind.
She said: Sometimes I wish I could unsee the world.
He said: No you don’t.
He loved her, yes; he’d seen galaxies when he’d held her for the first time.
Dear Dad,
If you’re reading this it means I’m probably dead. I’ve seen this happen in countless movies and books where the great and noble protagonist has tasted grief; knows deeply about the masquerade of death and the void that incidentally fills everyone’s mouths that she has to fill with her own comforting words. I’m on a night train through Goa, so the handwriting will be a bit of a sight. Thankfully, when I convert this to Braille, you won’t notice. You’ll just feel the holes and holes and holes that language becomes for those that can’t see it. Just a hole for a “I love you”, another few for “I think you’re great.” I guess it makes sense to me because whatever I say never carries enough meaning. It satisfies me to think “i’m sorry,” for example, becomes a blank hole for you to touch and feel and truly understand then to read it and underestimate every syllable.
This isn’t a pity letter. You know how bad I am at pity. And grief. This is much more my review of Planet Earth. If I do die before you then maybe it’ll help you really enrich the rest of your life. Maybe you can come to Goa, get on this exact train, pretend you’re in a movie or a book too, tell the conductor with the beard that your daughter was here once and then pretend not to feel the blush on his cheek when he confuses me with my blond-haired roommate who he had sex with just an hour ago. (On the other hand, they serve great lime tea.)
When I was much younger, my greatest interest in life was everything but life. I imagined that living on some other planet would be cool, that I’d be much better off somewhere that didn’t treat me as an absence; not presence. Just a synapse, a pause in between a hurried lash of words, an intake of breath that was never quite let out. I think, mostly, I was angry at the thought of the world going on without me when I died. The world would just spin and spin and spin and new black holes would be discovered, people would be happy, new bands would release life-changing songs, the sun would continue to approach the day it gave up and fizzled out and everybody would still write poems about it because we all simply love the things that kill us.
This is what my teacher back then said about the terrifying subject of death; It’s just evolution. You die because that’s the way things have always been. To my ears, that simply wasn’t fair. I prayed to the cobblestone of a city with no streets, swam in lemonade-soaked summers, smoked Viceroy cigarettes and waited and waited and waited for somebody to discover a way to be immortal. Then boredom set in, I became obsessed with boys and started waiting for Jim or Vincent or Matthew or whomever instead.
I remember when Mum had that affair and all you did was get drunk. You traced your way to the alcohol cabinet, traced your way down to the shed, traced your way through the bottles and when I came downstairs to check on you, all I found was the shadows and echoes of your traces. All I found was absence, not presence, and I realised we were both the goddamn same and that one day Jim or Vincent or Matthew or whomever would break my heart and I’d just drink drink drink and see the world like you in all its shades of black; reckless black, midnight black, lovestruck black, ocean black, black-hole black, the black we all lived in before we were born and after we’d die — the black you lived in before, during, and after. You were singing that song all night. The one you and Mum loved so much — the one about the girl in the sky with diamonds, the girl with the sun in her eyes, about tangerine trees, kaleidoscope eyes. The one you named me after; singing it to me when I was something then ten-something, twenty-something — snivelling, crying, sleepy, ignorant, lightening-in-a-bottle, electricity-in-a-box Lucy.
You asked her “Why?” she started crying — all flustered like an actress from a ’20s movie who didn’t want to ruin her vessel of perfection. “Because I wanted someone to see me.” And you just looked at her all funny, clinging to the edge of your seat, your eyes red-rimmed from too much alcohol, too much sleep, too much silence. “So why the fuck did you marry a blind man then?” At the time it was horrifying. Now in the bottled, dry heat of Goa and the aftertaste of sweet lime and the snores of a roommate far prettier than me, I find it smart. Even funny. Mostly because it was true. I’m exactly like Mum in that sense. I don’t mean to, my mind tricks itself into feelings of such abundant greatness. Doing things for the romance of it, staring at sunsets so I could tell somebody I did, writing death-letters on train because somebody in a film had followed a script and done it too. Mum was waiting for somebody to shut the curtain, to take her final bow, to hear the camera go off. Then after people would pass her glasses of champagne and tell her just how brave she was, marrying a blind man. Marrying a man who loved her thick accent, the feel of her collarbones, her sing-song, wine-soaked voice on Thursday mornings, the shape of her words and not her hips.
She would say: “I love time and the sky and you.”
And you would answer: “Funny how they’re all just illusions.”
Did I ever tell you I used those lines in the short story I wrote for Vincent? He was trying to come up with ideas for a feature film. I was the girlfriend, the muse, the catalyst, the listener, the fearsome conquerer, the warrior with the long eyelashes all at once. Every morning he’d wake up with a new idea and I’d write a synopsis or a short story or a poem in my lunch break; try to make the fragments into something. Except, of course, I could always see the cracks and I would always think it was terrible, atrocious, nonchalant, retrograde. I always carried around that extreme insecurity, the idea that I was walking entropy, that I was the God of all chaos, the reason cars crashed and people died and men hit their wives. Once when I was experiencing a psychedelic blur, I wrote a story about that too. Vincent loved it; it nearly made the cut.
I met Vincent in your favourite city: London. Saturday night, shimmering, forgotten horizons, a city too afraid to sleep in case the world continued spinning without it. It was some house party. Hard-Fi was playing, I couldn’t dance. The lights were giving me the kind of epilepsy you get when your whole world turns artificial blue and the vodka kills everything inside you. He was just out of film school. He knew all about the movies I loved: Rushmore and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and all those classics Mum loved and wouldn’t explain to you. He knew about cameras and black holes, had swallowed thunder and all the electricity of the world so that every time he spoke it was impossible not to hear him, had done an internship on a porn movie set (just something I couldn’t tell you until I was dead) and find the whole entire idea of life just so damn exhilarating. He was ineradicable, immortal, practically shimmered in the oblivion of a cinema, in the pages of a Dickens, in the sheets of an unmade bed.
I went home after that party, listened to Kishi Bashi on the train, saw the city through four eyes (mine and yours); saw its languid streets, its starry skies and polluted enigma. I wrote “Oh London / you filthy city / I love you!” in my journal, saw cepheid stars on the lids of my eyes; didn’t even change out of my clothes. I lay on the bed and I saw the entire world stretch in all directions like I never had before. I think that’s what really great things and people do to you, Dad — they make you forget a life before, a life where you hadn’t heard that song or seen that movie or kissed that guy. Where you hadn’t been caught up in the intensity of euphoria and vivid perfection. I actually don’t believe that perfection doesn’t exist. I just believe it is fleeting, always passing us by too fast and yet far too slow for us to take actual notice of it. I think you didn’t know that; you missed the flowing gold looking for something more solid.
Was I in love with Vincent? Probably. Was I in love with the idea of love? Yes. Did I spend a very large portion of my time being everybody I had once cursed? Yes. Did I wait for him to text me back before it was too late, before my phone ran out of charge, before the song ended and the magic was gone and I became nothing swimming in something again? Yes yes yes yes yes, oh god, yes.
In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim gets unstuck in time. I think that’s what will happen to us all when we fall in love and when we die. And mortality won’t matter when mortality doesn’t even exist. Isn’t that beautiful? Yes yes yes yes yes, oh god, yes.
This remains a review; when we reflect on the pale blue dot, the puppet with the minuscule role in the show of the universe, all we can think about is love and pain. The extreme, the extraordinary, the human creation that is larger than the human itself. Isn’t that enough to describe 13.8 billion years of existence? Yes yes yes yes yes, oh god, yes.
Here we all are: plebeian conquerors with our kaleidoscope eyes, in our newspaper taxis, our head in the clouds. I’ll die and then the song will die and music will die and everything will cease to be, even those moments that promised they wouldn’t. The whole world will explode in a fit of molecules; in a kind of epilepsy you get when your whole world turns artificial blue and the vodka kills everything inside you. Then I’ll turn to God and ask “Why?” and he’ll say “Yes yes yes yes yes, oh god, yes.” because nothing ever has any meaning. Not even the end of the world.
Love your daughter,
your Lucy in the sky with Diamonds.
They asked Vincent what the last thing was she had said to him. He said: I can’t remember. I wish I could.
Which ironically perfectly suited his thoughts on Lucy.
Zainab is a seventeen-year-old student living in the North of England. She is Murakami’s biggest fan and an ardent Americano-drinker, and she is passionate about music, stories, literature, films, cosmology, and pizza. In her spare time, she helps to run a zine called Circa Verne, and she can be found on Instagram: @contrazen.